Philips introduced elastography on its iU22 unit with the Vision 2010 upgrade, an addition to its breast imaging platform. The company received FDA clearance on its elastography solution a little more than a month ago.

"Eventually, I see elastography as a button-like color flow on the system. It's another piece of information with a really interesting technology that we think is very valuable," says Leichner. "More elastography features are going to be on the iU22 for things like the liver, the thyroid and the prostate."


GE Healthcare first announced the elastography feature on its LOGIQ E9 unit in March at the AIUM Annual Convention. It uses a high frequency E-series transducer with a simple compression technique.

"Physicians have traditionally examined differences in tissue by hand palpation during physical exams," says a spokesperson for GE Healthcare. "The LOGIQ E9's elastography capability helps give doctors a digital interpretation of the physical exam that can be easier to reproduce in follow-up examinations by either the original physician or other clinicians."

SuperSonic Imagine, a French company, is taking elastography to another level. Its ShearWave Elastography technology measures the velocity of shear waves to produce a quantitative, color-coded representation of tissue elasticity.

"Conventional elastography looks at tissue deformation. What we do is find a special wave in the tissue called a shear wave, which speeds up propagation that's directly dependent on tissue elasticity or tissue thickness," says Jacques Souquet, the company's founder and CEO. "We measure the speed of what each shear wave propagates to extract the data."

A disadvantage of conventional or static elastography is that the success of its application is dependent on the user's training and experience. ShearWave Elastography is user-skill independent.

"The user is not required to push on the organ with the probe, which is what conventional elastography requires to create the deformation in the tissue. Here, everything is being done by sending a special train of ultrasound pulses on the transducer," says Souquet. "We extract the number, it is quantitative and it is in real-time."

At an ECR Congress symposium, SuperSonic Imagine presented the preliminary results of the largest breast trial ever undertaken by an ultrasound company. The goal of the study was to assess the advantages of adding elasticity imaging to gray scale ultrasound for lesion classification.

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